Organizational leaders often see gaming and immersive mLearning solutions as frivolous and potentially a waste of time. As a result, an engaging learning medium is often overlooked, resulting in missed opportunities to use mobile solutions as a strategy to improve employee skill building. Studies show that participants learn either because they are motivated to learn or because they are engaged in the learning. The challenge is in helping stakeholders understand that mLearning can be extremely immersive and effective for learning.

Technology innovations, increased learner expectations, and leadership demands continue to change the learning ecosystem. Learning organizations are challenged to deliver mobile learning solutions that range from just-in-case compliance training to on-demand performance support at the moment of need. As a result, gaining support and resources for mobile learning requires executing the correct business model and having the proper framework to have tough consultative conversations (i.e., trade-offs, budget) with executives.

Selecting and purchasing mLearning technology to enhance classroom learning is getting more difficult as options proliferate. Tactical decisions today can have long-term consequences for near-term budgets, mid-term learning, and long-term lifecycle support. You need a way to sort through all the options, limits, and restrictions based on various use-cases and learner needs.

Organizational learning infrastructures are constantly evolving, and mobile technology is now at the forefront of the new learning environment. Mobile technology provides the platform to provide informative and useful learning content to learners whenever and wherever they need or want it. Although the industry continues to stir with talk about mobile technology and the benefits it can provide to learning and development, CLOs have been slow to adopt mobile as a learning strategy. How do you best optimize mobile technology and ubiquitous connectivity for learning opportunities that have a positive impact on business performance?

Learning professionals have long battled what is allowable from an organization’s IT group. Understanding why IT has these issues is the best method of lowering these barriers. In today’s world, data theft has become big business. The IT group sees allowing personal laptops and mobile devices onto organizational networks as a surefire method to data disaster. As such, IT groups often shut all the doors to minimize risks. Opening those doors can yield huge benefits and can be relatively easy, if you know how.

Onboarding is a universal issue for all organizations. Employee-orientation programs raise awareness about people, practice, and processes, but there are lingering challenges that a new employee faces to acclimate to their new job: Each workplace brings a different vocabulary set, often unique to the organization, and quite commonly heard in both formal and informal conversations. How do newcomers learn different lingos and acronyms to become part of the conversations?

Making the decision to go mobile is one thing—making it happen is something else. Mobile-learning projects are complex, and change often. For an organization accustomed to a linear project timeline for eLearning development this can be a challenge. It’s important that mobile-learning projects are managed in a way that allows for flexibility and organizational success.

Medical training and continuing education that qualifies for American Medical Association (AMA) CME credits is traditionally done via classroom, online, and one-to-one training. However, these modalities have not kept pace with the technologies used by today’s medical professionals. More and more, medical organizations are confronting the challenge of producing AMA-compliant education and training that leverages the mobile technology of today.

In our field, mobile learning is the present and the future. However, implementing mobile learning in a secure environment is an ever-growing concern. It seems there are stories in the news every day describing a data breach and the damage such situations cause. Many organizations are facing this issue as demand becomes higher for mobile learning and they balance the desire to have an edge in an increasingly competitive market with the need to minimize risk.

Mobile removes the barriers that historically have bound learning to prescribed times and places. The need to learn has become more urgent and opportunities for learners to interact with content often materialize in unexpected, uncontrolled, and unstructured environments. The burden of technology is to deliver content in a manner that meets contemporary learning requirements.

How often has someone approached you and asked something like, “How much would it cost to build an online course?” or “How much does it cost to build a mobile app?” These questions are very hard to answer and change based on each project, client, and scenario. However, there are some guidelines that can help lead you through this process.

Citrix leverages a DITA-based solution for mobile learning that rapidly adapts to changing business, technology, and customer requirements. We want to ensure our source content is future-proofed against changes in delivery technologies in order to avoid vendor lock-in and retain tight control of the types of activities we include in training and how we present them to learners. It was also important that we minimize code maintenance and automate aspects of quality assurance by mining our content as data for metrics related to language and engagement.

Learning from the lessons of the past is critical in order to make the future better. This truth of life also applies to the world of mobile learning. There have been a large number of organizations that have gone down the mLearning path and an enormous amount of resources generated from lessons learned. There’s great potential to learn from the lessons shared in this mountain of data, if we have the tools and capabilities with which to analyze it.

In today’s fast-moving world it is increasingly difficult for individuals to allocate time to a long-duration learning event. In fact, the amount of time learners can allocate and maintain attention to a single learning event seems to shrink all the time. More and more, learning professionals are expected to deliver solutions that are minimally disruptive to work while still providing the support needed for performance.

Managing your mLearning development efforts is challenging. It’s easier to do so with project management software or tools, but they can be very expensive. Understanding which tools are available and which features are needed to manage your mLearning projects can help you pick the right project management tool at the right price.